Doom music (still) rocks

Back in 1993 appeared as a shareware what would become later a legend in the gaming industry as THE "first person shooter" - (even if there was a predecessor "Wolfenstein 3D") - Doom was the one that change the games genre forever...

More than the high end graphics, more than the exploding barrels, there was an amazing music that added to the gaming experience a total immersion in the "Doom" nightmarish world...

Here's a list of website were you can listen to remix of this legendary tunes :
Doomworld -- Music
Paul's Stuff - DOOM Music
The Doom Remix Project - the Dark Side of Phobos  (mp3 download)

NB : You can even listen to them directly from their webpage, using this "mp3 player bookmarklet" from delicious.com called playtagger.
Check this website for instruction on how to implement it.

"The image's Quest"

I'll start with a simple scenario : There's this photo you downloaded a few months ago ... and now you want to find where it comes from (because you want to credit the person who took the picture, because you want to find the web site's url you took it from, because you want to contact the author or do a modification and want to make sure the author posted it with permission to modify ... )

What to do ?

The first obvious thing is to search the filename on any search engine (google, bing, yahoo, altavista, photobucket etc ...)

But assuming the filename can't help you - (either it's irrelevant or you saved it under a new name - so there's no way to get any clue from it)

Here's some of my suggestions :

Google is offering the feature "Find similar images" which is cool because you can direct the search visually, but in my experience I end up at best with a "close, but no cigar" situation  (this service was previously in the Labs section http://similar-images.googlelabs.com/)

Now if your picture is a .jpg inside your photo - there are more informations than you think (it's called Exif) and you could use that to narrow your search.

For example flickr.com is offering a search tool based on the camera model (it's called "Camera Finder")

There are also some "image search engine" with a twist, that could help you in your quest :

• www.kalooga.com specializes in finding image galleries rather than individual images
• www.picsearch.com
• http://elzr.com/imagery allow to specify filetype, color, size 
• www.pixsy.com video and image search

Alternatively some search engine like "retrievr" (http://labs.systemone.at/retrievr/) will allow you to either draw what you're looking for ; or (like TinEye) will allow you to upload the photo you have and hopefully find where this photo appears!

And in last resort, if all else fails, there is idthis.org where you can post your photo and hope that a viewer will give you a hint, or advices that will put you in the right direction.

Now, if you have other tricks, your comments are welcome ... I have this pesky photo downloaded 2 months ago and still can't find it's source... (I wish, the source url could be automatically embedded in  pictures).

How I made the switch to LinuxMint

How (and why) I switched to LinuxMint

My laptop with Debian/Lenny(stable) crashed again today - "X server" Failed with a weird error "xf86OpenConsole : Cannot open virtual console 8" :

It happened to me already a few times before - causing loss of all the work I was currently doing (opened documents etc ...).

Today I wasn't happy either when it happened and  didn't want to troubleshoot - and since I've been testing LinuxMint for some time ; I figured it was time to migrate from Debian/Lenny to LinuxMint/Helena

The trick was that I didn't know if I could do that with the data in place.
So first step was a complete backup of my /home folder on an external HD (just in case).
Then (as root) I renamed my home folder "/home/myMix" folder into "/home/myMix-Shared"

After that I was ready to boot on the LinuxMint liveCD (good surprise, even my wacom tablet was recognized)
then on the installation screen with the partition I selected "specify partitions manually (advanced)"

The partition dedicated for the system had to be formatted obviously
but the /home partition - I made sure that the format option stayed unticked

and then I launched the installation (keeping my fingers crossed)
My username under LinuxMint is still "myMix" (that's why I had to renamed my /home folder previously).

After the installation (around 30mn) I ejected the cd, rebooted and then logged on the LinuxMint
I had a look at the /home there was myMix and my the other folder but I had no permission to read or write, so I typed the following command :

cd /home
sudo chown -R myMix myMix-Shared 
sudo chgrp -R myMix myMix-Shared

And that was it!

No data were lost, and now I just had to move each of my previous folder in their new /home/myMix
until the "myMix-Shared" was empty.

Kudos to the LinuxMint team, their distros is gorgeous - now I can enjoy tab in Nautilus and Gimp 2.6 among other goodies (like compiz).